Product purchases made through the Internet (e.g., via the World Wide Web) have increased rapidly with the growing popularity of the Internet. On-line retail ordering allows users to conveniently place orders for products from a client computer. For example, users can order products from a seller's Web site by submitting a purchase order to the seller's server which receives and processes the purchase order.
Often, a seller will encourage sales of products by promoting (e.g., through websites, newspaper advertisements, etc.) particular types of discounts offered by the seller. For example, a discount type where the user gets 15% off the total price of an order if the user spends over $100 may be promoted. Typically the applicability and value of any discounts for a purchase order is determined by the server upon receiving the order from the client computer. However, whenever the user changes the order before confirming the order, updated order information must be sent to the server, the server must re-determine applicability and value of any discount types for the order, and this information must re-sent back to the client computer. Thus, the conventional process for determining applicability and value of any discount types for an order is typically inefficient and requires multiple accesses to the server and multiple computations by the server.
As such, there is a need for a more efficient method for determining applicability and value of any discount types for an order received from a client computer. There is also a need for an efficient method for determining applicability and value of complex discount schemes for an order, for example, where applicability of a single discount type is difficult to determine or where multiple discount types may apply for a single purchase order.